Description

8×10 acrylic on canvas board

I don’t take a lot of my own reference shots, but sometimes I get out at Kensington Metropark with my binoculars and line up my phone camera juuuust right….and get one out of ten shots! This is one of those cases.

My wife and her mom came with me to the nature center one day at the end of winter 2025. They went their own way around Wildwing pond while I hiked the Chickadee trail.

All the trails at Kensington are magical, with the chickadees and titmice fluttering about and begging for a snack, but I love the scenery changes in the Chickadee trail especially. I saw a whole troupe of turkeys (they will be their own painting soon enough!) and a red-tailed hawk before I even got into the woods!

Toward the end of my hike, I crossed a boardwalk and noticed all the woodpeckers around me. I lined up my phone and my binoculars and got….a mediocre photo. But still good enough for a small painting!

I snagged a few more blurry photos of this red-bellied woodpecker and a couple of a downy, thanked the birds for their cooperation, and headed back to the nature center.

As for the painting itself, I was going for a looser style, letting some of the black-primed canvas show through as lines to define the tree and its branches.

This is what I call a “starter” painting. It’s a great addition to your existing collection, but it’s also a great little piece to start with. The size is large enough that you can appreciate the brushwork, but the price is accessible enough to appeal to the beginning art collector.